The Smarter Sculpted Physique: Training | Nutrition | Muscle Gain | Fat Loss

We began by discussing snack foods, which lead to us discussing meal frequency, hunger, metabolism, and what kinds of strategies lead to an optimized metabolism. Snacking as such is dangerous, but what about other strategies to deal with hunger and cravings? How does one negotiate these things?

♦ MEAL FREQUENCY AND METABOLISM ♦

Right now Kevin eats only one meal a day. Scott definitely doesn’t think this is the optimal way to achieve and maintain a lean physique and an optimized metabolism, but Kevin says that personally has not experienced draw backs.

Kevin mentioned that one of the benefits is that he’s less hungry when it’s not time to eat, but for Scotts, that’s almost a drawback: “tolerable hunger” is super important, and is a sign of an optimized metabolism; you don’t want to depress that.

Mike thinks hunger is more a balance. This is why he calls it the “sweet spot” of hunger. Sure, you can take things too far, but reducing what Scott would call “intolerable” hunger is a reasonable thing to do, provided you don’t take things too far, and you can still assess your own hunger to some degree. All of this is also related to how we define hunger versus appetite, “mental” vs. “physical” cravings, and so on, and the overlap between and intersection between these things.

Scott points out that more often than not if you look at high-end bodybuilders you’ll find them eating five or six meals a dya, not three. That’s worth mentioning.

Mike agrees that, yes, it is basically indisputable that frequent smaller meals at the same times each day “works.” If you want a sure thing, it’s there. But he admits that he’s looked in the research, and he hasn’t found overwhelming evidence that it’s physiologically advantageous. [I didn’t mention it in the podcast, but I like Alan Aragon’s Research Review is in this regard. It’s certainly not comprehensive — that’d be impossible — but it is balanced and fair. — M]

Scott believes this is one of those things where the research is just behind the folks in the trenches.

♦ LOW CARB vs. "HIGH FAT" ♦

Scott also wanted to point out that when Kevin eats a high fat diet, it’s not really the same as what is often sold as a “low carb” diet. Scott has written about Kevin’s diet before. It’s not “chicken breast” and broccoli.

Scott and Kevin “agree to to disagree” though about the high fat diet itself. Scott thinks it’s more dangerous metabolically than a high carb diet.

♦ LINKS & RESOURCES ♦

• A blog post Scott wrote about Intermittent Fasting

• Scott’s blog post about Kevin’s high-fat diet

• Scott's book, Beyond Metabolism

We look at how to make real progress through your workout program, and how to assess that progress. What does it mean to be in what Scott calls the “Mastery Phase” of a workout program? How important are strength gains? If it depends on the program, what factors determine this?

♦ WORKOUT PROGRESSION ♦

Training for Size vs. Training for Strength

Scott’s been posting exercise form videos on his Facebook page: facebook.com/CoachScottAbel

Scott also wanted to talk about how great and versatile functional trainers are. You can mimic pretty much anything. You can see Scott’s own in his home gym walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/kJ6pHGuxSVk

Workout program design needs to account for whether it is training ultimately for strength (e.g. powerlifting) or training for muscle development. If you’re training for strength, you’ll use volume, but your’e still straining ultimately for strength. If you’re training for muscle and development, you’ll gain strength, but you’re still training ultimately for muscle size and development.

Strength will have more linear periodization than training for hypertrophy and muscle gain.

If you’re training for muscle and size, the indicators of progress will be much more subjective, and perhaps subtle. You WON’T necessarily add pounds to the bar.

Key Term - Training Efficiency Percentage (or TEP) – the percentage of reps in a set that force an adaptive response. I.e. a beginner does a set of 10, and the first 7 reps are easy. It’s only the final few reps that seem hard. By contrast, look at an experienced lifter. Even from the beginning those reps are difficult.

Key Term - Maximum Voluntary Neural Activation: Simplified answer: your ability to activate your CNS and make as many muscle fibers as possible contract.

♦ THE MASTERY PHASE ♦

The Mastery Phase comes usually at least 6 weeks into the program, and it’s about getting through the initial “getting used” to the program your body goes through, and now you’re at the stage where you can really hammer it.

What does it feel like? You’re no longer trying to remember, “Oh, do I do this, or this? Where do I go after? Aw, crap, how am I gonna super set this exercise with this other one?” At this point, you’ve figured it all out, both on the macro level (exercise 5 follows exercise 4, which follows 3, etc.) and on the micro level (this is how you perform this specific exercise).

On the one hand, this is just… memory. Not even “muscle” memory, but just plain old memory. AND YET, that is important too, and plays a role. It’s not the entire thing, but it’s a part.

♦ STRENGTH IN THE SERVICE OF SIZE? ♦

Subjectively, you should always choose a weight that challenges you within the reps indicated. The program design should take care of forcing an adaptive response, which doesn’t always take the form of #s on the bar.

Both Scott and Kevin agree that training for 1-rep max strength is not optimal if your goal is muscle development.

Kevin thinks you do need a certain base level of strength before you start adding volume or worrying about advanced strategies. You just need to go through that initial progression.

♦ LINKS & RESOURCES ♦

Scott’s book, The Abel Approach, covers the science of what we talked about. Learn more here.

The Innervation Primer provides more of a general intro.

How do you build work ethic? Why do some people have tremendous work ethic when it comes to one aspect of their life (e.g., career) but struggle with others? (e.g., fitness). In this episode we debate the nature of work ethic.

♦ WORK ETHIC ♦

Scott wanted to share stories about work ethic and the development of it.

Scott remembers when he wanted to play hockey as a kid, his father say okay, but then — since Scott was a goalie — he had to go outside and practice with his father and brother every evening to make sure he kept sharp.

Kevin remembered that doing your chores as a kid was something you just always had to do; there was no sense of “If you do X, you get reward Y.” It was simply that… there are some things that need to get done — go do them!

Mike was ambivalent about the development of his work ethic, because he’s had good work ethic in various domains of his life, while being totally lazy in others, so pinning it down “work ethic” as this one consistent “thing” you have more of or less of doesn’t make sense to him.

For example, Scott wondered if Mike being lazy in school had “consequences,” i.e. the fact that he was extremely overweight. Mike’s answer: no, definitely not, because that was one area where he was trying his darndest to lose weight (not intelligently, mind you, but trying nonetheless).

An important part of this is self-efficacy and agency. With dieting etc., he felt lost and a lack of agency. But overcoming that — while it didn’t necessarily build “work ethic” — did build a sense of agency and self-efficacy, and that might be more important.

Scott remembers working in a factory doing hard manual labor and at first being horrified of the idea of doing that for the rest of his life, but then reveling in it, though partly this is because he was working precisely for the reason that he was working his way out of that life.

Everyone agreed that having a parent who believes in them is important; there’s an important thin line between “never good enough” and knowing deep down that a parent believes you are capable of much, much more.

Scott views work ethic as much more of a continuum. Some clients come to him and clearly just have no background or experience in hard work. Other clients, by contrast, have amazing work ethics, out of the box.

Based on the ways in which his own work ethic has manifested — first in one domain, then all of a sudden carried over into another domain where previously he’d had none at all — Mike thinks that a lot of people actually have something like hidden reserves of work ethic — they just need a switch flipped, in terms of agency, choice, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, beliefs, and that sort of thing.

♦ LINKS & RESOURCES ♦

• Carol Dweck’s Mindset

• Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated

How do you take time off in a healthy manner? Without guilt? The holidays are finally wrapping up. In this episode we talked about some of what *we* actually did, in terms of taking time off (or not), as well as some of the really unhealthy things we’ve seen prescribed to people.

♦ KEVIN ♦

Kevin just completed a huge move, so his schedule for the past month and a bit has been extremely hectic.

In terms of diet, Kev mostly kept to his same schedule, but he did take some time of training.

He did enjoy some treats for Christmas, but his eating schedule was *mostly* on point. He made do when he had to.

Since he’s getting ready for a powerlifting comp, Kevin is much more “weight” focused (i.e. what weight class he’ll be in) than he is worried about his actually physique.

♦ SCOTT ♦

Every year Scott gets a lot of emails from clients who are surprised that they didn’t lose all their gains when they took time off.

Part of this, granted, is eating well and having an optimized metabolism (i.e. not yo yo dieting and messing it up)

Scott also saw a lot of nonsense prescribed to non-clients, like coaches say, “Oh, you can have Christmas dinner with family, but you need to do no carbs and cardio in January.” This is… mentally unhealthy.

Scott did a parody video about this: The Twelve Days of Christmas

♦ MIKE ♦

Mike went to a few dinners with his family.

Mike actually prefers to mostly stay exercising in some form. Honestly, he just feels better.For example, if he knows he won’t workout much (because he’s, for example, at the cottage), he might go for an extra long walk with his dog, for example, helps with digestion, energy, and his thinking and stress.

♦ WHAT IF YOU DON’T HAVE AN “OPTIMIZED METABOLISM”? ♦

Scott: “Choose the behavior, choose the consequences.” There are consequences for everything. If you have dinner with family, yes, you might gain weight. That’s a consequence. But if you don’t do it, you might feel mentally deprived, and you’ll miss out on Christmas dinner. That’s also a consequence. Sometimes… you just have to choose.

A small step back doesn’t mean “give in” for all of January. What if, instead, it meant you’re ready to get back to things refreshed and ready?

(There is a huge difference between “ready and refreshed” and “desperate with guilt to lose weight.”)

♦ OTHER NOTES ♦

You don’t need food police. Don’t hire a coach to be that!

Mike noted that it’s “okay” to make some sacrifices now in order to reap rewards later; this doesn’t make you a mindless gym lackey who always needs to be “hardcore”…. BUT, at the same time, you need to be careful: do you find that you’re constantly making sacrifices “just for now” for rewards that never seem to come? If so, that’s a problem.

♦ LINKS & RESOURCES ♦

• Scott’s 12 Days of Christmas Parody

• Alba’s tranformation

• Check out Andy Sinclair’s Website for pics of him.

Scott and Mike discuss balancing aesthetic goals with health goals for those folks in the Physique After 50 club. Sometimes fitness and so on isn’t about “health.” Sometimes you just want to look good naked. But obviously there is a balance. So: how do you achieve it? How does age come into play?

The discussion was prompted partly by listener questions and partly by Scott’s new book The Aging Proposition, which is now on Amazon, and is about changes in mindset after 50. (That said, the first book Physique After 50, was probably more relevant to this podcast.)

♦ AGE AND AESTHETIC FITNESS GOALS ♦

Question 1.

How relevant is age to obtaining aesthetic goals?

Question 2.

Does age have as much impact on reaching aesthetic goals versus general health and fitness goals?

One way to avoid the problem of sacrificing health for looks is avoiding the “calorie burning” mindset. It’s not about burning X cals per hour. It’s about maintaining an optimized metabolism, which is in turn about maintaining muscle.

Scott thinks bodypart resistance training is much, much better for joint health. Strength training can be good (especially for sports goals), but after 50 your joints need to be considered.

♦HOW IMPORTANT IS TRAINING HISTORY?♦

Question 3.

How realistic are aesthetic goals for the “beginner” club member vs. the one that is starting with a fair amount of muscle and experience built over a lifetime?

You need to be realistic of course, but there are always, always positive changes someone can make. Just because stepping on stage for the Olympia isn’t in the cards doesn’t mean you should just not go to the gym.

The “Compare, Contrast, Compete” game is an exercise

Scott really likes a graduation speech often referred to as “Wear Sunscreen.” (Links in Show Notes.)

♦WHAT’S MORE “IMPORTANT”? AGE OR GENDER?♦

All things considered, men tend to have a metabolic advantage. It’s easier for them to put on muscle, maintain a healthy metabolism, things like that.

That said, it depends what your goals are and how you define your terms: sure, a woman has “more trouble” putting on muscle. Typically speaking, though, a woman doesn’t want to put on as much muscle as a man. There are TONNES of factors at play in trying to make a (useful) generalization here.

Mike: “Whatever your stubborn spots are at age 25, are going to be your ‘even more stubborn’ spots at 55.”

♦“PRECISION” IS THE SOLUTION…♦

For Scott, precision is about not having the person fit the program, but having the program fit the person.

He cited a popular sign up for an online challenge or something that was 100% the same for people age 25 to 55. That’s not precision. Get a program customized to you and your needs, lifestyle, goals, challenges, body type (etc etc ad infinitum).

This is more important after age 50, with its changes in hormones, metabolism, and everything.

For example, in his mid-fifties, Scott has to be very careful. He has a VERY developed work capacity. This means he is very “capable” of driving his body into the ground, because his recovery capacity has diminished much, much more than his work capacity has. By contrast, a total beginner at age 50 still needs to protect their joints and so on, but it’s really not the same situation.

♦ METABOLISM AND AGE ♦

At the same time, stick to the basics. Nothing “-arian.” (Thanks James!). Or Michael Pollan’s advice: “Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plans.” Avoid trying to short-circuit your appetite with “craving crusher” whatever. Eat real food.

What about someone whose metabolism is not totally messed up, has never had a weight problem,

Scott's wanted to talk about two recent studies on the perils or "hidden costs" of personal quantification for awhile now. This includes things like calorie trackers and calorie monitors, step trackers, heart-rate monitors, gadgets, fitness apps, and more.

♦Jordan Etkin, "The Hidden Cost of Personal Quantification"♦

This is from the Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 42, 2016. It was also reported on in The Atlantic.

Etkin did six experiments on tracking and quantification, all of which manipulated the subjects in terms of whether they had access to some kinds of tracking or were measured in some way. So when subjects got feedback about how fast they were coloring, they did it faster, but enjoyed it less, and showed less creativity.

From the research article's intro: “This research examines unintended negative consequences of personal quantification. I propose that while measuring output can increase how much of an activity consumers do (e.g., the number of steps they take over a day), such measurement can simultaneously undermine intrinsic motivation” (p. 967)

In an experiment on reading, Etkin re-framed the act of reading as either “work” or “fun.” For the people who were manipulated such that the reading was framed as fun, when you added in measurement on top of that, it decreased enjoyment. But for the subjects who thought of reading as work, adding in the measurement didn’t decrease motivation or anything. This basically jives with the idea that one of the problems with measurement is it turns a fun activity into work.

As Scott pointed out, it can be even worse if it turns a fun activity not just into work, but into a form of critical, negative self-judgment.

Etkin also makes a point that measurement doesn’t affect enjoyment if it is integral to the activity. E.g., a video game where you have HP points or you’re going for a high score or whatever. Or gambling. Or a sports game.

Danger for personal trainers: “Likewise, personal trainers are increasingly using personal quantification devices to track clients’ calorie consumption and energy expenditures. If doing so reduces how much healthy behaviors are enjoyed, this practice may hamper long-term clientele” (p. 981)

♦ "Effect of Wearable Technology Combined With a Lifestyle Intervention on Long-term Weight Loss" ♦

Published in Journal of the American Medical Association, Sep 20, 2016. It was also reported on in NPR.

From the abstract: "Objective: To test the hypothesis that, compared with a standard behavioral weight loss intervention (standard intervention), a technology-enhanced weight loss intervention (enhanced intervention) would result in greater weight loss."

From the abstract: "Conclusions and Relevance: Among young adults with a BMI between 25 and less than 40, the addition of a wearable technology device to a standard behavioral intervention resulted in less weight loss over 24 months."

From NPR article: “Ultimately, Patel says, these devices are most effective when the people using them are already dedicated to tracking their fitness.” If you’re a nerd who’s into fitness (like Mike) and you go out and buy a fitbit, it won’t kill all your motivation.

♦ Avoiding the Danger ♦

Mike's question: How does it happen? Scott talked a lot about how clients go from a "honeymoon" period to feeling imprisoned, as though they "have" to track this, or track that, and if not, their world will fall. but how does that happen?

You avoid it by being real: you won't gain fat "just because" you stop tracking this or that. You can still have some control of your intake without an app or a tracker. You can still know how your exercise is going without a pedometer.

Seek out the benefits: go outside and enjoy the meditative aspect of a...

Getting back on topic, we started with EPOC and exercise, but moved into a kind of “case study” of how to read biofeedback when you’re dieting for a wedding or some other specific date. Using an average female dieter (average age, height, weight, athletic background, etc.) as a kind of “case study” we talked about how much lethargy and hunger and so on is “safe” and how do you read that kind of thing safely?

This is an interesting question, because the Coaches can talk about “sustainable dieting” all they want, but if someone has a super important date coming up that they’re preparing for — and if it’s a wedding, then it’s one of the most important dates of many people’s lives — in the real-world people just are going to risk some metabolic compensation to look good. That’s totally reasonable, assuming you’re intelligent and you don’t go all out with an extreme very low calorie diet for your wedding, and instead you rationally balance your desire to lose weight and look good with an acknowledgment that your body needs to be treated well, and there will be more or less metabolic compensation down the road, depending on how you diet.

♦ MEASURING FAT LOSS & WEIGHT LOSS PROGRESS ♦

How will I know I’m making progress in getting lighter if I don’t have an objective measurement?

Scott actually pasted this in to our list of questions at the last minute from an email — he wanted to emphasize again that many people need to forget the scale. As an indicator it’s often not as reliable as many people think.

Other things that matter more: having a reasonable amount of hunger but good energy, how do your clothes fit, how the mirror looks, etc.

Also, the danger of the scale is that it turns into a tool of self-judgment. It’s no longer being used rationally to lose fat.

♦ EPOC, OR EXCESS POST-EXERCISE OXYGEN CONSUMPTION ♦

“Is EPOC [excess post oxygen consumption] really a significant factor of an exercise program?”

How much does EPOC really matter? Not that much.

Kevin: If you really want a yes/no answer, the short answer is basically, “No, EPOC is ‘not’ a significant factor.”

The longer answer has to do with “well, what’s the program? What are the trainee’s goals?” and is much more focused on long-term metabolic optimization than it is on counting the number of calories burned during some arbitrary number of hours after the workout.

A huge factor is the trainee: a young high-performance athlete with all their hormones revving is going to experience a different “bump” than someone who’s training to lost a bit of excess fat, by going to the gym for 40 minutes three times a week. This isn’t just “well the high performance athlete trained more intensely so they got a bigger bump.” No. It’s a total look at their athletic background, age, their hormone levels, their entire lifestyle and approach to diet. These things matter. Reducing your calorie burning to a single number, once you think of it this way, is absurd.

“EPOC” is often a longer-term thing.

♦SITUATIONAL HYPER-METABOLISM♦

There is such a thing as situational hyper metabolic environment, but often people discount the fact that, yeah, you’ll get this, but you’ll also see an increase in hunger.

As a coach you can’t let hunger run rampant, either, because that will lead to a rebound of some sort. (Coax the body and it responds… etc.)

A sign of this would be the client starting also to dream about food, or losing sleep over their hunger, or losing energy and having issues with hormones (i.e. lack of sex drive).

A good sign of hunger being too high is that there is no sense of satisfaction even immediately after eating.

Mike’s question, though, is what if someone is staying in that hyper-metabolic state?

This one went straight off topic. It started out as a rant but quickly became a debate about things as far ranging as the minimum wage, personal responsibility, and what Scott calls a culture of entitlement.

♦Minimum Wage ♦

Scott's position was that raising the minimum wage when people currently aren't doing their job wasn't going to solve anything.

Mike's position was that the role of a minimum wage isn't to support people who don't need it; it's to ensure that those who do need it (because they need to support themselves, and potentially a child, and potentially they need to do so in an area with a high cost of living) aren't left out.

Mike acknowledged that small businesses do find it hard to pay workers above a certain threshold, but to him that's about there being a lack of infrastructure and a lack of help for smaller businesses who are just getting started, while larger corporations benefit insanely from economies of scale, yet tend to pay disproportionately fewer taxes.

Kevin agrees that the minimum wage should be raised.

♦Mike's Liberal Mindset ♦

Scott wanted to "challenge Mike on his liberal mindset."

Mike acknowledged he is totally a bleeding heart liberal.

Mike doesn't think all corporations are by definition evil, but the problem is that, currently, society is such that they're allowed to be evil.

Scott thinks we have an entitlement culture, based on his experiences with service industries. Mike's response was, sure, plenty of people are terrible at their jobs... but that happens at all levels of society, and it is not an argument against dealing with the insane amounts of wealth inequality in North America.

This was going to be an episode about exercise questions, but it went in a totally different direction. We talked about diet psychology, culture, and the social influences on our food choices and how we think about food. Why do people feel “guilt” about Thanksgiving, while others embrace it? Where do these influences come from, and how is it relevant to dieting?

♦ REVIEW: ♦

“Such a fantastic show. The amount of knowledge & insight these 3 men have provided in such a relaxed, realistic, respectful manner makes a really entertaining, yet such an informative podcast. I really look forward to opening the email each week, regardless of the topic. I have learnt so much & have become much more relaxed about my approach to my training & realistic about diet. It’s such an eye opener to the insanity that can come into this industry. Keep the shows coming.”

♦ NUTRITION AND DIET PSYCHOLOGY ♦

Scott began by ranting about nutrition courses that don’t delve into the psychology of food and diet at all.

“Diet Psychology” is not “willpower” or something like that. It’s about the entire context of influences that dictate how and what we think about food, why people can think about food in terms of “good” foods and “bad” foods, why some people feel differently about meat products, why one generation thinks about food differently than another.

Mike brought up a book he’s reading (and really likes): Acquired Tastes, which actually interviews Canadian families about precisely these things. From the description: “Magazine articles and self-improvement books tell us that our food choices serve as bold statements about who we are as individuals. Acquired Tastes reveals that they say more about where we come from and who we would like to be. Interviews with Canadian families in both rural and urban settings reveal that age, gender, social class, ethnicity, health concerns, food availability, and political and moral concerns shape the meanings that families attach to food.”

We all know these things, but the trick is digging into our own beliefs, and how they were formed.

Scott really likes Anthony Bourdain’s television show, Parts Unknown, because Bourdain travels the world and really gets into the culture and explores how food relates to that culture. Scott notes that Bourdain fully embraces food, but he’s not overweight, and has no weight problems.

Mike mentioned a well-known joke: Two fish are swimming along, when another fish passes by, saying, “Hey fellas, how’s the water?” The fish smile and pass on by. A moment later, one fish says to the other, “Wait… what the heck is ‘water’?” For everyone in the world, there is a huge part of our life that’s just… water. Stuff we don’t notice or see, stuff that is so ingrained into our day to day life we don’t notice.

Kevin discussed actually growing up on a farm. This involved taking care of livestock, and preparing it for meals, and yeah, that meant being involved in the slaughtering of animals like chickens. This wasn’t about “eat local.” It was just… life. It was his water.

By contrast to Kevin, Mike notes there are those who “eat local” in a surprisingly self-indulgent way, where it’s no longer about doing good, but about patting yourself on the back for doing so. (To be fair, this is probably true of just about everything.)

As an exercise, Scott recommends as a journalling exercise asking yourself what your upbringing taught you about food and how to think about food? (How did your parents talk about food? How did your friends? What was served at school?)

Also: as an experiment, we’re having a Thanksgiving Survey to try and get stories and insights about how people feel about food over the holidays. It’s totally anonymous (if you want to leave your name, though, you can),

We again structured this episode around a few specific questions, but focused on metabolism, cheat days and refeeds, and then balancing those with real life and one's fitness goals. If you have a social event coming up, how do you handle that? Should you just use "moderation"? What is or is not a healthy mindset? How does one balance "vigilance" with "not being totally and insanely obsessed"?

♦ "METABOLIC RESILIENCE" ♦

Metabolic resilience is something someone does or doesn't have. What kinds of things your metabolism can "withstand" is going to be partly genetic. So because someone says "Oh I went on a starvation diet and it was no big deal," doesn't mean that will hold true for everyone, or even for them, if they were to do it again.

The problem is that going on a 21-day or 12-week challenge or whatever can be exactly the kind of thing that is not good for your metabolism. Adding in strict timelines like that is an example of forcing the body, not coaxing it.

Sometimes it's far, far better to lose weight slowly. Sure, it's sexy to lose 7 lbs. in a week. That doesn't mean it's good for you, sustainable, or worth doing.

What can you do? Mostly it's not screw it up. But, that aside, what can be done? Generally, it's the big picture stuff: looking at lifestyle and larger context, eating whole foods at roughly the same times each day, protein plus a protein-sparing nutrient... and doing all these things long enough for there to be a change.

The hard part is sticking to these things for a long enough time period for positive metabolic effects to take hold. This is hard, because you won't see the change on the scale.

You should feel better before you see changes on the scale. It's not you just do all these things, and then oh, eight weeks later you're allowed to start losing weight now.

Biofeedback to look for: You should (1) start feeling better overall, (2) perhaps sleeping better, (3) perhaps be more in touch with hunger, and (4) have more energy. [There are probably more indicators; those were just the ones mentioned that I could pick out. - M]

♦ QUESTION 1. SOCIAL EVENTS AND AESTHETIC GOALS ♦

• • •

I’m interested in “How to have your cake and eat it too.” How do I balance social events with aesthetic goals on a weekly basis.

• • •

Depends on the person. For example, imagine two extremes: the person who uses social events as an excuse to immediately go off their diet, and, on the other end, people who will dread social events because they are so focused on diet that they cannot deal with the mental turmoil of the "temptation" (and are afraid of binging, either at the event or later one). These two extremes are obvious, but you can imagine how they'd require different approaches!

One strategy is to use those as a target. So if Thanksgiving or Christmas is coming up, yeah, have a cheat meal, and use it as a target to be committed to the process until then. Don't binge on that day, but see it as something to shoot for. (At the same time, every Saturday != a once-per-year holiday).

When it comes to weekly cheat meals (big ones) the fact is, metabolism has to be trained. That means, again, healthy whole foods, a relative caloric deficit, a protein and a protein-sparing nutrient (carb or fat) at each meal.

Sometimes the answer is, no, you can't go to as many social events as you have been going to, not count calories, and maintain 7% bodyfat. That is a high-level aesthetic goal, and depending on genetics, age, etc., it's a higher level goal for some than others. There's no way around that it takes a bit of vigilance to get there and stay there.

**NOTE:** This doesn't mean you can't go to social events. It just means you go without indulging. Does that mean you don't eat it all?